LAW, RELIGION AND SOVEREIGNTY

By the mid-eighteenth century, Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic proclaimed their faith in liberty: they appealed to a common constitutional tradition even as they disputed its ownership and its application. They claimed the ‘rights of Englishmen’ and revered the texts in which they believed them to be embodied, like Magna Garta and the Bill of Rights. They commemorated a similar Protestant calendar of momentous anniversaries, including the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the execution of Charles I, and the birthday of the reigning monarch. They celebrated, and suspected a minority who were ambiguous about, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Settlement, and the accession of the House of Hanover. They structured the political lives of their communities around representative institutions, and had the Westminster Parliament in mind as a model. As the Scots and Irish in the New World and the Old were progressively caught up in this hegemonic English myth, they too were drawn to subscribe to it and loudly profess it in order to exploit its libertarian implications: they were implications to which their very different sectarian and political traditions also pointed. Law and religion dominated men's understanding of the public realm.

Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic received, and idealised, the common law. Law was, nevertheless, an area in which transatlantic discourse broke down, and this book explores, on a theoretical level, one of the pathways along which this process developed. On a practical level, much more might be said.